Data is an asset to an enterprise and its loss or theft can cause severe harm to the enterprise's business. Many enterprises therefore implement file scanning software to protect their data from being disseminated outside the enterprise. Current file scanning offerings provide a reactive means of security, that is in order to protect an enterprise's data from loss or theft, a file must be first scanned then “cleaned”, i.e. all violating content must be adjusted or removed. In a reactive system such as this a document may need to go through this cleaning process multiple times to ensure the document, as it is authored or modified, continues to conform to policy. This multi-step process has failure points that can be exploited either intentionally or unintentionally. The most notable shortcoming of this type of system is that if a file is not scanned, then violations cannot be identified and thus can be disseminated outside the enterprise.
To prevent data loss or theft, a document scanning system that is proactive and difficult to avoid is needed. The need for such a system has heretofore remained unsatisfied.